The Suffering of Women Who Didn't Fit

'Madness' in Britain, 1450–1950

David J. Vaughan

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526732309
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For over 500 years, women have suffered claims of mental decay solely on account of their gender. Frigid, insane, not quite there, a witch in sheep's clothing, labels that have cast her as the fragile species and destroyer of Man.This book reveals attitudes, ideas and responses on what was to be done with 'mad women' in Britain.Journey back into the unenlightened Middle Ages to find demonic possession, turbulent humours and the wandering womb. In the Puritan Age, when the mad were called witches and scolds ducked for their nagging. The age of Austen and a sense and sensibility created from her fragile nerves. Then descend into Victorian horrors of wrongful confinement and merciless surgeons, before arriving, just half a century past, to the Viennese couch and an obligation to talk.At the heart of her suffering lay her gynaecological make-up, driving her mad every month and at every stage of her life. Terms such as menstrual madness, puerperal insanity and 'Old Maid's Insanity' poison history's pages.An inescapable truth is now shared: that so much, if not all, was a male creation. Though not every medic was male, nor every male a fiend, misogynist thought shaped our understanding of women, set down expectations and 'corrected' the flawed.The book exposes the agonies of life for the 'second class' gender; from misdiagnosis to brutal oppression, seen as in league with the Devil or the volatile wretch. Touching no less than six centuries, it recalls how, for a woman, being labelled as mad was much less a risk, more her inevitable burden.

Chapter 1

Engendered Madness

We start this chapter by revisiting five hundred years of (mis) reading women, followed by the more awkward trajectory of defining madness itself. Coursing through these two strands is how an absence of the latter failed to desist control of the former. And how the ‘understanding’ of both was acquired without recourse to herself!

Defining Women Over 500 Years!

The (male) definition of womanhood has a long and arduous history, most of it constructed on masculine fear. ‘Opinion-formers and policy-makers produced their own phantom Doppelgänger, reminders of [the] dangers lurking within, of what would break loose if law and morality broke down’. At the heart of this terror sat the corruptible woman. ‘Late nineteenth century fears of demoralised, hypnotised, hysterical, or nymphomaniac women reveal male insecurities about precisely what normal women – your wife and daughter! – were really like’. A circumstance that revealed ‘more about the crisis of personal beliefs and professional status of the [authority figures] … than about their [targets’] ‘diseases’’1Yet the stage for this Victorian model had been set more than two hundred years before, and consistently targeted a perceived feminine guile:

‘For pride and madnesse are of the feminine gender. They have reason for it. Man was made but of earth, Woman of refined earth; being taken out of man, who was taken out of the earth [a reference to Eve’s creation from Adam’s extracted rib]: therefore shee (sic) arrogates the costlier ornaments, as the purer dust’.2

In these clerical times, of medieval religion writ large through Puritanical fear, the language and castigation of women grew increasingly stark: ‘By means of a whorish woman, a man is brought to a piece of bread’ (Proverbs 6: 26) – that is, a dissolute woman will bring a man to his knees. The blocks were now building for a means of control, the target of which was her facile mind.

Adams saw much to fear in their ‘beauty’:

‘If you prayse their beauty; you rayse their glory: if you commend them, command them. Admiration is a poison, that swelles them till they burst [i.e. go mad].’3

Moreover:

‘because the brain responded to the operation of the reproductive organs…the mentalities of the sexes differed as well. It was the totality of the physical and the mental differences that made up the essence [that] doctors [and others] confidently called woman’s ‘nature’.’4

This nuisance apparatus of human reproduction – and the masculine ‘wisdom’ on why women existed – created her reasons to fall. Energy depletion, in body and mind, left her prone to decay – especially ‘up there’ in the brain and the mind. While her gynaecological equipment – from the womb to the ova and her ‘regular cycle’ – made her not just more volatile, but more suited to nurture than to try to compete (the male’s exclusive domain).

Maudsley’s assertion that ‘there is sex in mind’ was rendered ever more derogatory by the epitaph, ‘as distinctly as there is sex in body,’5 extolling the thesis by condemning the female as unsuited to public ‘offices in life’ – i.e. those outside the home. Thus, a woman’s mental collapse came when she undoubtedly dared to presume to know better than nature.6

An endless litany of sexist opinion saw control exercised on and withdrawn from the woman (had she ever possessed it), and it was achieved through what they said was medical ‘progress’, ably assisted by attitudes in both culture and law. Nineteenth century alienists like Prichard, Laycock and Beard (actually an American neurologist) introduced causes of the weak womanly mind, respectively homicidal mania; nervous diseases; and sexual (not just gender) neurasthenics. Beard made a career out of women’s apparent neuroses, predicated on immoral living and his pessimist’s view:

‘The causation of sexual neurasthenia, as of all the other clinical varieties, and of modern nerve sensitiveness in general, is not single or simple, but complex; evil habits, excesses, tobacco, alcohol, worry and special excitements, even climate itself - all the familiar excitants being secondary to the one great predisposing cause – civilization.’7

Having labelled the ‘Dark Ages’ of nervous women just a half-century before, Beard unintentionally endorsed contemporary responses and insisted ‘a large group of nervous symptoms, which are very common indeed, would not exist but for morbid states of the reproductive system’ – though he had the good grace to extend the problem to both sexes. Nevertheless, he clearly believed in the origins of the woman’s poor nerves: ‘lacerations of the cervix and perineum, irritations, congestions, and displacements of the uterus and ovaries’…amongst others.8

As Cheyne avowed barely two hundred years earlier, history proved how it was middle class women who were found to be chiefly at risk, insisting it was the idle rich who suffered the worst of weak female nerves. While, as Woods has more recently stated, such women were particularly invested with purity, marriage and outward economic endowment, and having so much to live up to, their minds inevitably collapsed under the weight of their domestic oppression.9

By the long nineteenth century, the scene, having already been set, was now being ever fine-tuned to fearing the woman – especially one who had pride in her charms. The response, then, was to oppress and belittle, which none less than Charles Darwin redefined (and endorsed). In The Descent of Man, he wrote explicitly about woman’s ‘inferior state’. As he spelt out his perceptions of biological difference, he acknowledged evolution’s preparation for the differing sexes; men were designed to excel at art, science and thought, while women’s superior traits were restricted to ‘intuition, perception and imitation’.10 Such ‘strengths’, he argued, were ‘characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation’ – an intended slur on a woman’s role in the human existence.11 Thus, for many, the misogynist’s view was receiving endorsement.

Nature was where much of female suffering was given its justification. The implications were stark. ‘Nature and society mutually illuminate each other,’ Jordanova remarked. ‘Gender functions in this way because it is… part of the natural world, the source of all morality and ethics…’ Defining a woman and her role in the world, based on natural order, became so entrenched that declaring her mad seemed a quick easy-fix for condemning and subjugating the gender.12 By extending such fear, the pitied and now reprovable female – from girlhood to womanhood, through puberty, maternity and into old age – was more wont to psychiatric decay far beyond that of (most) men! But nowhere more so than in becoming a mother.

Maternal Collapse

Motherhood raised especial concerns in the realm of the mind. The forthcoming chapter on so-called ‘maternal mayhem’ elucidates this far more, but it is worth highlighting here how it became the ultimate focus of female suffering – from her physical danger in the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, to the oncoming ills of the nerves and her mind. According to many, her propensity to derangement arising from her capacity to bear children was indeed her unequivocal curse:

‘During that long process, or rather succession of processes, in which the sexual organs of the human female are employed in forming; lodging; expelling, and lastly feeding the offspring, there is no time at which the mind may not become disordered; but there are two periods at which this is chiefly liable to occur, the one soon after delivery, when the body is sustaining the efforts of labour, the other several months afterwards, when the body is sustaining the effects of nursing’.13

A degenerative moral sense too, born of impaired and inferior faculties, her conduct and especially her self-control, all were seen now as prone to collapse. As Clouston advanced, as late as 1911: ‘A certain lack of [selfcontrol] is, I fear, almost expected in woman, and the highest degrees of it are not commonly expected in her…[it is] few who are not prone to yield in conduct to emotion, instincts and impulse.’14 William Tyler Smith, a Victorian male midwife, went even further, and guaranteed a mother’s insanity at the very moment she gave birth.15

Maternal madness could be ‘traced’ to several sources, as far as was seen by nineteenth century minds. And so great was their number, it was a miracle that any woman escaped being untouched by a perceived malediction. Amongst them were the following concocted conditions.16

Uterine changes led to an unstable brain – what Maudsley described as ‘affections of the uterus and its appendages afford notable examples of a powerful sympathetic action upon the brain, and not unfrequently play[ed] an important part in the production of insanity.’17 Blood decay, in both circulation and quality - Maudsley again, perhaps now revealing a misogynist’s theme?18 Melancholia reared up from weakened nerves, though whether from her natural make-up or from being confined whilst pregnant remained a moot point. And the curse of new mothers, puerperal insanity, the maternal mayhem en vogue. In simple terms comprised of mania and longer-term melancholia, the latter including lactational madness.

The same Professor Hogan, in an arguably overly feminist tract, recently lamented both the invention and misdiagnosis of maternal insanity conditions, typically puerperal mania. Insisting that such a tag of abuse ignored the real cause of the new mother’s condition, she highlighted bacterial infection as the real blameworthy cause.19 Hardly unheard of in pre-modern times, yet more unsettling was how motherhood itself was reduced to the woman’s ‘pivotal purpose’.

Not that such notions were confined to the Victorian era. The postwar years of the twentieth century retained its gendered perspectives. Psychotherapy also attracted stern condemnation, as self-labelled feminists compared Freud’s psycho-sexualisation of women as another form of malecentric control.

Ahead of the emerging 1960s ‘chemical culture’, with first its American then European claims of magical pills, it was really the underground attitudes which were shifting the sands. Since the dawn of the ‘chemical cosh’, and the marketing of a new breed of sedatives and anti-depressants, more people, women especially, were effectively self-diagnosing via the medicine chest. Even in popular culture, this ‘brave new world’ was not going unnoticed; as heard in the Rolling Stones’ hit, Mother’s Little Helper, a rebuke on the increasingly popular diazepam drug, perhaps better known by its Valium trade name. Compare it with those nineteenth century cousins, laudanum and antimony, once the asylum superintendent’s favourite for keeping her under control. The latter worked by keeping her nauseous but is now used in fireproofing fabrics!20

Thus, from Darwinian theories to post-modern ‘abuses’, the ‘inferior’ mental state of the female sex saw her succumb to her subordinate nature, and her mental collapse during her maternal ordeal. From such a set of evolutionary circumstances, women had long-fought life’s battle just to stay sane. These age-old misogynist responses to motherly madness perpetuated if not exaggerated earlier centuries’ failings, bringing in a new wave of psychiatry formed on the old tide of gender control. Wrongful confinement may by the Sixties have become a thing of the past, but wrongful coercion remained another matter entirely.

Periodic Control

To witness the myriad ways in which men ‘managed’ their women is to see how the means, whys and wherefores of gender control fluctuat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Engendered Madness
• Chapter 2: The Hysteria Hysterics
• Chapter 3: Maternal Mayhem
• Chapter 4: ‘Correcting’ Women
• Chapter 5: Suffering Women: the ‘Unfortunate’ Sex
• Appendix 1: A Token of Madness
• Appendix 2: The Unsuitable Suffragette Mind
• Endnotes
• Further Reading
• Plate section